Thinking Digital conference: Hyper-local

May 22 2008 By Andrew Mernin at The Sage Gateshead

WHILE most news stories come from hacks like us at nebusiness towers, in the future it could be your neighbour or milkman that bring you the headlines that matter to you.

That is the view of Darren Thwaites - editor of The Journal’s sister paper, the Evening Gazette – who is pioneering a scheme at the forefront of the rise of citizen journalism.

Speaking at today’s Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead in the session on the power collaboration, Mr Thwaites championed the growing success of hyper-local websites.

The Evening Gazette, through its gazettelive.co.uk website, has developed a number of ‘postcode’ sites where members of the community generate news which affects them and their neighbours.

Mr Thwaites said he had been overwhelmed at the early success of the initiative, although he admitted that the newspaper still remains the title’s main revenue stream.

He said: ““We can delve deeper into our local community through our hyper-local websites and what has struck me is that it’s not necessarily my team who are breaking the stories, it’s my neighbours.

Mr Thwaites also highlighted the fact that community journalism can generate content for newspapers – drawing on a story from the hyper-local website from his area about fly-tipping in a nearby field.

He said: “It turned out that people were dumping rubbish there because the council had increased the price of the local tip – so we almost had a mini campaign started by the editor’s neighbour without the editor knowing about it.”

Click here to discuss the changing role of citizen journalism in our forum.